Journal of the History of Philosophy

Suhrawardi, a Twelfth-Century Muslim Neo-Stoic? JOHN WALBRIDGE EUROPEANS FIRST BECAME AWARE OF ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY through texts translated into Latin in the Middle Ages, the youngest of which were the works of the Spanish philosopher Averroes, dating from the second half of the twelfth century. The latest eastern Islamic philosophical texts known to Europeans dated from almost a century earlier. Western orientalists later became familiar with the original Arabic texts of works of the major authors previously known in Latin translation--Fftrabi, Avicenna, Ghazfdi, Averroes, and others--along with works of other Islamic philosophers of the same period. While it was known that there continued to be philosophers in the Islamic world after 12oo, it was assumed that their works reflected the general "decline" of the Islamic world and that the authors known to Europeans represented the "classical" Islamic philosophical tradition. The later tradition of Islamic philosophy (with the notable exception of the fourteenth-century philosopher of history, Ibn Khaldfin) tended to be ignored or dismissed with references to "epitomes" and "supercommentaries.''' In fact, it can be argued that the historical reality is exactly the opposite, that it is precisely the part of the Islamic philosophical tradition not known to the I am presently working on a collection of Arabic texts relating to Stoicism, including scientific as well as philosophical material. I would be grateful to readers for any references to Stoics in Islamic texts that I might otherwise have missed. Please contact me at Near Eastern Languages, ~body loz, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 474o5, USA. ' The widely-used anthology of medieval philosophy, Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh, eds., Philosophyin theMiddle Ages (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1973), includes no Islamic philosophers later than the twelfth century and no eastern Islamic philosophers later than the theologian Ghazali (d. 1111)--i.e., no Islamic philosophers other than those who direcdy influenced medieval European philosophy. Even a comparatively recent book like Majid Fakhry's A History of IslamicPhilosophy(~nd ed.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) devotes 80% of the text to the period up to Averroes and only about 6% of the text--i 9 pages--to the Eastern philosophers of the 75° years between 1xI l and the modernists. [515] 516 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:4 OCTOBER 1996 West that was most original and philosophically significant. It is true that Islamic philosophy in the western Islamic world largely died out after Averroes, but the tradition begun by Avicenna has continued up to the present in Iran, where it is taught in the seminaries and universities. The Latin West knew Islamic philosophy through the rigorous Aristotelianism of Averroes and the eclectic Aristotelianism of Avicenna, but it was unaware of the anti-Aristotelian views of Averroes' younger contemporary Shih~b al-Din al-Suhrawardi (i 15491 ), who set the agenda for this later tradition. In Europe, Renaissance philosophy was marked by the revival of interest in non-Aristotelian traditions of philosophy: Platonism above all, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, and various forms of occult thought such as Hermetism and its subordinate occult arts. Out of this stew emerged the vigorous new traditions of Renaissance and early modern philosophy. A somewhat analogous process took place in the Islamic world some two hundred years earlier, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though its impact was restricted to the narrower confines of philosophy and mysticism. Suhrawardi is the central figure in this development in Islam. He vigorously championed the views of Plato and the Presocratics against the Islamic Peripatetic tradition of Avicenna and his followers. His most important work, The Philosophy of Illumination (H.ikmat al-Ishrdq), consists of a systematic critique of Peripatetic/ Avicennan philosophy and a new metaphysical system whose organizing principle is light. His system, which he called "Illuminationism," became the starting point of the later Islamic philosophical tradition in Iran and India, whose key figure was Mull~ Sadr~ 057i-i64o). Though Sadr~t disagreed with Suhrawardi on certain key doctrines, his philosophy represented a development of Suhrawardi's views.9 9An accessible intoduction to Suhraward| (and to the non-Aristotelian interpretation of Avicenna) is Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Muslim Sages: Avicenna, Suhraward~, Ibn "Arab~(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). Modern studies...